Seeking mentors and project ideas for Google Summer of Code 2024!

[armanbilge]

tl;dr

• we're applying for Google Summer of Code 2024 🎉 due Feb 6
• if you would like to be involved with mentoring contributors (even if only a little), please let me know!
• if you have project ideas for Typelevel org or affiliate projects (or even an inkling of an idea), let's talk!

I want our application to reflect that Typelevel is vibrant with a culture of teaching and learning together. If you are active on GitHub and/or Discord, then you are already a de facto mentor in our community :) so please consider adding your name to our application ❤️

Ideally each of our projects will have a couple primary mentors and some number of additional supporting mentors.

• Primary mentors have good knowledge of the project and are available to contributors for 2–3 hours a week over the coding period June–August e.g. pair-programming, PR review, chat.
• Supporting mentors are interested in the project and want to help out when and where they can :)

Andrew and I are working on setting up a project idea page, will follow-up with that soon.

Further reading: Official Mentoring Guide from Google.

Why mentor?

1. It is rewarding to help grow the diversity of our community. The results of the 2023 Scala Survey suggest we currently skew heavily towards advanced, long-time Scala developers. Let's change that :)

2. Raise money for Typelevel. Google will pay Typelevel a small stipend for every contributor that we mentor.

3. GSoC contributors Get Shit Done. Last year our contributors:

   • integrated Cats Effect and FS2 with Linux kernel APIs and made Ember 3x faster
   • implemented network protocols and enabled more projects to cross-compile and run on 100% Typelevel stack
   • designed Scala APIs for Open Telemetry Specifications and opened the door to a pure Scala SDK

[TonioGela]

I'll be happy to join as a mentor!

What I'll like to mentor on is a project that @armanbilge and I had in mind since a while ago: a new library to interact in a more "fluent" style with the file system like the one briefly described in this conversation.

I think we can grab some inspiration from @ChristopherDavenport's shellfish if needed.

The first and most obvious use case for this library would be scripts written with our toolkit, and IMHO this library might contribute to reducing the initial fear (or steepness of the learning curve) that newcomers might experience when approaching our purely functional stack.

[TonioGela]

Hi @error9098x,
if you want to begin with Cats Effect (that is the library that sits at the core of the typelevel purely functional stack) the best place to start is probably Essential Effects by @arosien.
If you want to focus more on doing file I/O, I will suggest you to do it studying the documentation of fs2 that links to plenty of presentations, slides, blogposts, etc. There is also a specific section to perform for file I/O.
Last but not least, there are some examples in the toolkit documentation about writing/reading CSV files and more that might be handy.
Also, the best advice I can give you is to join the Typelevel Discord Server, where we have a channel called #beginners and a dedicated #fs2 one that are good places to ask questions and get answers.

[arosien]

@TonioGela @error9098x happy to provide a free copy of "essential effects" if you want, email me adam@inner-product.com

[TonioGela]

@arosien I bought mine a long time ago ;)

[ayhon]

This looks like a really cool project!

Out of curiosity, what happened with shellfish? It seems to fit the requirements pretty nicely, although the website is no longer accessible and there aren't many examples.

[armanbilge]

Out of curiosity, what happened with shellfish?

@ayhon good question. I would described this GSoC idea as "maturing" shellfish, by enhancing / stabilizing the APIs, adding cross-platform support (JS/Native), and writing documentation. All of this is necessary so that it can be included in the typelevel toolkit.

[mpilquist]

@armanbilge I'm happy to mentor / advise on any of the fs2 related projects.